On Beatin' It

A lot of people ask me what the purpose of this blahg is. Well, that's not really true. There are not a lot of people who even know about this blahg, so they're obviously in no position to be asking me anything about it. In fact, nobody really cares. But that really makes no difference to me. In fact, this all helps to answer the question I posed in the first sentence on an admittedly false premise.

Anyway, so far we've had a few anonymous responses to the tripe with which we've siphoned away our own spiteful bits of bandwidth. The only one of any substantial length was wholly negative--in fact, it was bombastic enough to suggest that the writer spent a good deal of time fashioning it, which means that we've obviously bothered at least one person out there with our mere existence to compell her to respond ad nauseam, which is Latin for "too much and without irony." This, unlike Campbell's russet potatoes, is not a point of pride. The previous sentence contained an inside joke directed at Eli Moss. I'm not going to explain it, since 50% of our readers are Eli Moss, and the remaining 50% are themselves 50% Eli Moss. That relates obliquely to the point I'm trying to make, I think. Maybe not.

So I guess I've left it unsaid for long enough now. The whole purpose of this blahg is masturbation. It's the intellectual equivalent of beatin' it. Eli and Eli know as well as I do that we could easily be using our time for more valid and positive pursuits--for instance, anything--but we've decided to put this garbage together anyway, because it sort of feels good. It's something done, essentially, for ourselves, to give an outlet, in a quasi-ironical sort of way, for our swelling egos. Swelling, as a matter of fact, like baboon cocks. The world is our pornography, and the keyboard is the stroking hand. That's really quite coarse. I don't care. Nobody reads this.

I think none of us harbor any delusions about the pettiness of all this. Even if there is anything we can contribute to the world--and, because we're all nihilists at heart, we know there isn't--a blahg is the absolute worst avenue for us to take. Even popular blahgs get no traffic. Even Maddox, the Internet Superhero, is utterly inconsequential. Nobody cares about him. Nobody cares. We could say that this is different, because the (imaginary) target audience is really just people we know, but look at the example of Max Karson. Who cares about Max Karson? I don't, and I even read him. He commands my attention for the five minutes it takes to read his tasteless newsletter, and then he's the farthest thing from my mind. He doesn't matter. We matter even less.

So that brings me back to the point: beatin' it. It's a thing to do. The fact of the matter is that we're three individuals who come from a town pretty well regarded among bullshit intellectual circles, and by most of the prevailing standards we're comparatively remarkable. I'm going to Harvard, Moss is going to Brown, and the Real Eli is going to Columbia. I don't know about the other two, but I'm not really proud of this. The problem is that, according to just about everyone around us, and just about everyone in America (as well as East and Southeast Asia), we're supposed to be proud.

There are children falling asleep in South Korea tonight beneath pictures of strangers smiling in front of the John Harvard statue, because their parents want them to remember how much they can accomplish. Certain teenagers across the country would probably cut off several of their least favorite fingers (or one of their favorites) to have my spot in the class of 2011. It isn't because they're crazy. They are really just the logical extension of a cultural trend to measure success among young people with a yardstick sold (at a wildly inflated price) by the College Board. America has always been about the Rat Race. Once upon a time is was for money, for cars, for the corner office and the blond, buxom wife. Really it's still about that, but it's seeped down into the younger generations and the objects of desire have become degrees printed with certain names. We've got our own Rat Race, and all of the sudden, we three assholes have basically won. We've won and we don't understand why or how, and in my case I don't really understand when I even started playing.

You don't need to read another rant about the futility of social climbing. You don't need to hear another person explain that prestige is a shameful illusion or that education is worth nothing if pursued for the sake of success. You know this. You can't graduate high school without knowing this. Yet nobody ever talks about it. Everyone seems to insist that they've got some purpose, that they're going somewhere, that they're shooting for the Ivy League so they can make a difference.

BULLSHIT.

People go to the Ivy League for the same reason I do: they don't know what else to do. Nobody knows what to do or what to try to do. Guidance counselors say that college is the place to find yourself. That's nonsense. That's like saying a restaurant is the place to decide if you're hungry. The only evidence we have that anyone finds himself in college is that sometimes people drop out. The others stick around, get their degree, and hope the answer will appear before they get stuck with kids. Starting at the end of high school, there is a big standing joke that everyone is in on but nobody is laughing at. I'm not sure of all the details, but it's got a big lead up and the punchline is something to do with taxes. But mostly people just never really get it, and so they revert to the simplest, laziest, and most foolproof of all philosophies: hedonism. They drink every chance they get, have sex every chance they get, organize their longterm goals around fulfilling fantasies, and in the meantime they masturbate in one way or another. Beatin' it. It's a way of life. Anyway, it's better than Confucianism. Cocentric circles my ass.

So if you really want to know what this blahg is all about, you need to know that we embrace its worthlessness. Nothing we do here is meant to accomplish anything, nor is it even really meant to boast or to be self-inflating. We aren't trying to earn validation or to piss people off. We've just spent our lives in a vacuum of meaning and are about ready to be shipped off to another, but in the interim we've decided to set up our own, because, hey, it's just another thing. Everyone gets to the point when he grows tired of being told he's on the top of his game, suspicous because he's never really had to work for anything, and starts to wonder if the game isn't just a load of bullshit after all. Then, more often than not, I guess, he realizes that it is, and so he does the only thing that doesn't rely on the value of anything else: beatin' it.

So there you go.

-Tim

P.S. I don't care about being funny. Bite me.